Recently added management articles

• When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule by Vivek Wadhwa "Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40." view details
• Inside the secret world of Trader Joe's "All of that can lead to a better customer experience. A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying 'aisle five.' Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try." view details
• 10 Steps to Successful Marketing using Agile and Lean Practices "Every 2 weeks, we hold an Iteration Planning meeting. Each team member has her own sticky note color, creates stories on those notes and manages her own prioritized backlog using T-shirt sizing to roughly estimate each story. ... As we keep running our iterations and fulfilling our commitments, we are always looking for ways to improve them." view details
• Thoughts on how Kanban Differs from Scrum by David Anderson "Kanban uses the WIP limit as its control mechanism to provoke conversations about change. Failure to respect the WIP limits and discuss problems will lead to stagnation and a failure to improve. Improvement discussions are objective as the visualization, measurement, explicitness of policies and the models from Lean, Theory of Constraints and the teachings of W. Edwards Deming, allow a team to scientifically analyze their problems and propose solutions." view details
• How to Discuss an Employee Performance Problem by Dan McCarthy "Knowing how to sit down with an employee and have an effective conversation about a performance problem is one of the hardest things for any manager to do, new or experienced, and should never be taken for granted. It’s also something that’s often screwed up – managers are either too vague and soft or too blunt and harsh. Both won’t get the desired results – improved performance." view details
• The Lean Influencer’s Mantra by Siraj Sirajuddin Video presentation on leading change to adopt lean thinking. view details
• Who Really Cooks the Books? by Warren Buffett "For many years, I've had little confidence in the earnings numbers reported by most corporations. I'm not talking about Enron and WorldCom - examples of outright crookedness. Rather, I am referring to the legal, but improper, accounting methods used by chief executives to inflate reported earnings. The most flagrant deceptions have occurred in stock-option accounting and in assumptions about pension-fund returns. The aggregate misrepresentation in these two areas dwarfs the lies of Enron and WorldCom." view details
• Warren Buffett's Letters To Berkshire Shareholders by Warren Buffett Every Investor should read these. Letters going back to 1995 give you insight into Warren Buffett's ideas on investing, the economy and business. view details
• William Considine embraces Lean Six Sigma to improve Akron Children’s Hospital "before it brought out the hammers, it asked members of the department and of the hospital's Lean Six Sigma team to review the problem. Turns out, a simple redesign of the processes and space solved the problem. No space added, no employees added, and $3.5 million saved. ... f your child needed an MRI two years ago, the waiting list at Akron Children’s was about 25 to 28 days. Through discussion with department employees and dissection of the workload, the hospital was able to add 35 MRI tests a week, dropping the wait time to three days or less." view details
• IT the Toyota way "The IT department is also building a custom dealer management system to help dealers introduce the principles of the Toyota Way into their own workplaces. It's looking internally at its own processes; instead of the waterfall approach to development -- where a lot of planning and building of solutions is done up front and then given to the customer -- Toyota has adopted an agile process." view details
• An Introduction to Deming’s Management Ideas by Peter R. Scholtes An Introduction to Deming's Management Teaching and Philosophy by Peter Scholtes – webcast from the Annual W. Edwards Deming Institute conference in Madison, Wisconsin, November 9th, 2008. view details
• Comparing Lean Principles to the 14 Toyota Principles "Toyota Principle #1: Base Your Management Decisions on a Long-Term Philosophy, Even at the Expense of Short-Term Financial Goals. ... Stopping to fix problems puts an organization in a systematic problem solving method (Lean Principle #4) so that bad quality is not passed on and variation is reduced from the system." view details
• Theo Albrecht, Trader Joe's, and Ruthless Focus by Wally Bock "When you've got a strategy that works, stay with it. That frees your people up to lavish innovation on the strategy. It helps you concentrate your resources and your efforts." view details
• Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule by Paul Graham "There are two types of schedule, which I'll call the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule. The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. ... When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in." view details
• How to Apply Japanese Company-Wide Quality Control in Other Countries by Kaoru Ishikawa Kaoru Ishikawa highlights how to improve performance based on 20 years of experience visiting countries all over the world to give consult on quality control implementation. view details
• Metrics and Software Development by John Hunter "I find looking at outcome measures (to measure overall effectiveness) and process measures (for viewing specific parts of the system 'big picture') the most useful strategy. The reason for process measures is not to improve those results alone. But those process measures can be selected to measure key processes within the system..." view details
• Jeff Bezos's mission: Compelling small publishers to think big by Jeff Bezos "I would hope people would say that Amazon is earth's most customer-centric company, and that we work backwards from customers. Many companies sort of look at what their skills are and they work forward from their skills. They say this is what we're good at, and this is what we'll do. It's a very different approach from saying here is what our customers need, and we will learn whatever skills we need. ... the key is that the company has to experiment, and what you want to try and do is reduce the cost of experimentation so you can do as many experiments per unit time as possible ... and they're not experiments if you know they're going to work." view details
• 12 Things Good Bosses Believe by Bob Sutton "My success — and that of my people — depends largely on being the master of obvious and mundane things, not on magical, obscure, or breakthrough ideas or methods." view details